Showing results by narrator "Jack Chekijian" in All Categories

A Texas Ranger reflects on his years of service, a career in which he was said to have run down more criminals than any other Ranger. Sullivan tells of numerous scouts and expeditions, of hunting buffalo, of encounters with Native Americans, and of important captures of train robbers and outlaws. Originally published by Von Boeckmann-Jones Co. in Austin in 1909.

Literature's famous gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha, his trusty squire Sancho Panza, and their adventures and mishaps, are told in this centuries-old classic, which features challenges with windmill monsters, castles masquerading as inns, as well as innkeepers, prostitutes, goat herders, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts, and scorned lovers. Don Quixote must do battle with all of these for the sake of chivalry and knighthood - at least, that is what he believes.

From 1875 to 1881, James B. Gillett served as one of the Texas Rangers, the lawmen of the Old West. Looking back 40 years later, he tells of his numerous clashes with Native American warriors in the West Texas borderlands, of the Mason County War and the Horrell-Higgins feud, and of dangerous missions into Mexico. Originally published in 1921.

The creator of Sherlock Holmes investigates the true story of two young girls who claimed to photograph fairy creatures in rural England.

This collection, from an acclaimed master of dark fiction, consists of 21 tales. Some are straight genre entries, others are stories of psychological terror, and a few are shorts that include science-fiction elements. The first 18 are short stories written solely by Rick Hautala; the final three are collaborations with Jesse and Matti Hautala, Matthew J. Costello, and Jim Connolly.

Wry, dry, and arch, this production of Lewis Carroll's classic tale of a fall through a rabbit hole to a fantasy world is otherwise just as familiar as ever. After a century and a half, Alice's adventure in Wonderland, one of the finest examples of literary nonsense, continues to attract listeners.

The names of the months and the days of the week come from a time in the ancient past. Collected here are the stories which these names tell. Gods, heroes, and planets come into play with the names of the months and the sunlit countries of Greece and Rome, and the names of the days and the cold and stormy northern lands of the Norsemen.

Though it may never be known if Mother Goose was based on an old French queen, a Boston housewife, or someone else entirely, these nursery rhymes will continue to entertain as they have in varying forms for hundreds of years. Though commonly thought of as children's literature, the alternatingly dry, sarcastic, and histrionically tinged humor with which this production is delivered appeals to a wide audience. Arguably.

Find amusement with the hundreds of classic riddles, jokes, and puzzles in this collection! Gathered from every conceivable source and delivered in a droll fashion, this selection of brain teasers is as sound today as it was 100 years ago.

Gideon Sunday, an ex-semi-professional American Football player, goes to his pantry to retrieve an awful bottle of his (dead) sister's fruit preserves. When he gets there, he discovers a meadow in his pantry. He closes the door, takes a few breaths, and begins to investigate. Upon discovering that A) no one is playing a trick on him, B) there really IS a meadow in his cupboard, and C) there is something three-quarters of ugly coming out of it, he decides to beat a monster to death with a baseball bat.

Over the last 2,000 years, ambitious men have dreamed of forging vast empires and attaining eternal glory in battle, but of all the conquerors who took steps toward such dreams, none were ever as successful as antiquity's first great conqueror. Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) managed to stretch an empire from Greece to Asia's Himalayas at just 30 years old. It took less than 15 years for Alexander to conquer much of the known world.

Innocent, his own country had called him a murderer. Now murder was his livelihood. John Seldon hired himself out as an assassin, a sharpshooter, to kill a tyrant named Castro in exchange for cash. He did not flinch from his task until the fatal moment, when he found the girl whose love had made him want to live again.

The need for and demands on leadership have changed radically in the past few years. To be a dynamic and effective leader of a 21st-century organization or corporation requires an entirely different strategy and set of skills than it did just five or ten years ago. In fact, much of the best advice and examples from even the last decade no longer apply.

This famous tale featuring a headless horseman is among the earliest examples of American fiction with enduring popularity, especially during Halloween. It is set in 1790 in the countryside around a Dutch settlement of present-day Tarrytown, New York, in a secluded area called Sleepy Hollow.

This is the classic - and somewhat clichéd - image of the Vikings, and their fearsome reputation was in many respects well deserved, the Norse sagas charting their deeds in all their lurid glory. But over the past century, thanks to a wealth of new archaeological evidence, a much more nuanced picture of the Vikings has emerged, providing profound insights into one of the most astonishing, misunderstood, and adaptable of European civilizations.

Pirates plundered other ships on the high seas while on the brig Crawford a cunning act of piracy was perpetrated by a veteran pirate leader. He slit his own throat to escape justice while three Spaniards he recruited stood trial with the esteemed Chief Justice John Marshall presiding over the federal court in Richmond, Virginia, in 1827, a rare trial. Follow the action in a blow-by blow description of the murder and mayhem right into the courtroom.

This Victorian farcical comedy was Oscar Wilde's final play, published from exile in Paris. Wilde has his characters adopt false identities to escape their social obligations. The witty dialogue throughout this production's dry approach to the material make for entertaining high farce.

This production of the famous 16th-century political treatise by diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli will appeal to those interested in his political philosophy and not in the many historical and regional allusions that the original work contains. The latter have been excised in this abridgement.

Charles Manson, the Yorkshire Ripper, Aileen Wuornos: take a closer look at some of the world's most prolific serial killers with in-depth profiles of history's most evil men and women. Explore their early lives, their twisted predilections, their horrifying crimes and the chase to bring them to justice, and marvel at how so many of these brutal murderers were, until their crimes came to light, seemingly just another face in the crowd.

This condensed version of the King Arthur narrative was compiled by folklorist Andrew Lang from traditional sources and features all the familiar iconography: the sword in the stone, Excalibur, the Round Table, Camelot, Merlin, knights and chivalry, and the quest for the Holy Grail.